Warner Bros. Pictures has provided ComingSoon.net with a first look at the new poster for director Martin Scorsese's The Departed, opening October 6 and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson and Mark Wahlberg.

The Departed is set in South Boston, where the state police force is waging war on organized crime. Young undercover cop Billy Costigan (DiCaprio) is assigned to infiltrate the mob syndicate run by gangland chief Costello (Nicholson). While Billy is quickly gaining Costello's confidence, Colin Sullivan (Damon), a hardened young criminal who has infiltrated the police department as an informer for the syndicate, is rising to a position of power in the Special Investigation Unit. Each man becomes deeply consumed by his double life, gathering information about the plans and counter-plans of the operations he has penetrated. But when it becomes clear to both the gangsters and the police that there's a mole in their midst, Billy and Colin are suddenly in danger of being caught and exposed to the enemy – and each must race to uncover the identity of the other man in time to save himself.

that's absolutely horrible. the poster maker(s?) took steps to conjoin damon and nicholson at the cheek. and they foresaw the difficulty in reading the big title so they wrote a smaller one to go next to it.

You Don’t Know JackNicholson’s first collaboration with Scorsese helps him get in touch with his inner godfather.Source: New York Magazine

Sometimes you don’t say my main goal is to be original and breathtaking, because that puts too much pressure on you as an actor,” growls Jack Nicholson, in an unusual bout of humility that he will quickly dispel. “But in this case, I felt that, in all honesty, that was what they hired me for.”

Certainly, Nicholson couldn’t squander the opportunity to appear in his first Martin Scorsese film on some chump part. In fact, he initially declined the role of a Boston-Irish gang boss in The Departed.

“I always give a fast no when it’s no, and originally there wasn’t a part there,” Nicholson says. “I said, ‘I’d love to work with you, Marty, I’ve always wanted to work with you—and Leo—but I just can’t do something because I like the idea. I gotta have a part that I’m interested in.’ ”

So “the fellas,” as Jack says—Scorsese and his boys DiCaprio and Matt Damon, who play an undercover cop and a gangster mole, respectively—made room for a meaty role for Jack. Nicholson and Scorsese began creating his part together, improvising new material until the end, as they attempted something fresh: an evil godfather who wasn’t “another black-suited gangster whose power is silent,” Nicholson says. “We wanted to take Marty’s genre, the gangster thriller, and find a way to flat-out do it differently, and to push the envelope. And, well, we pushed it.”

Jack, who’s always thought his erotic appeal is underrated, first asked for sex scenes. “These kind of monsters, they don’t usually have a sex life onscreen, so I wanted to bring that to the part.” He chuckles. “I pushed that side pretty good. He’s a mad, bad nut job, so he’s evil sexually too. Fuck ’em, kill ’em, you know … At the moment, it’s a matter of discussion how far we went, as a matter of fact,” he says proudly, noting that Scorsese’s currently debating whether to edit down his brutal lovemaking.

Even worse, Jack’s sadistic Irish Southie is so evil that he wears a Yankees hat on the streets of Boston. “First of all, they wanted me to wear a Red Sox hat,” he grumbles, “but I said, all things being equal, I don’t want to.

“My Yanks, they came before the ­Lakers, of course,” says the Jersey native. “But Kristen [Dalton], my inamorata in the picture, she wore a Red Sox cap both to subtly indicate domestic conflict and to politically mollify the fans in Boston.”

So Jack, six-time presenter of Best Picture, and Marty, six-time loser of Best Picture, have finally filmed an Oscar contender together. Jack says, “This could be the one for Marty,” though he admits he doesn’t know much about his competition this fall. He’s too caught up in the pennant race: “I’d like to help A-Rod out, because they just won’t shut up in the Stadium,” he says. “But my man’s Giambi. He’s my kind of biker guy, and his game face—well, I wouldn’t want to come between him and his goal, let’s put it that way.”

And with that, Nicholson releases a satisfied sigh. “My immediate work, the Yankees, moviemaking in general, sex, and so forth … I’m always happy to talk about the great loves of my life.”

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“Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” - Andy Warhol

Leo's risingThe boyishness that made Leonardo DiCaprio a star is gone, replaced in two new films by the complexity of a lasting leading man.Source: Los Angeles Times

Leonardo DiCaprio is taller in person than he appears on-screen, which is rare in a movie star. Also broader, though not to say heavier or gym-rat pumped. But gone is the weedy boyishness that turned "Titanic" into a tweener smash, that followed him through "Catch Me if You Can" and made Howard Hughes' final mental and physical dwindling believable in "The Aviator." In his A-list requisite baseball cap and shades, DiCaprio could still pass for a hipster agent, but there is something unexpectedly substantial about him.

And that, unlike his height, is very much evident on-screen. In his two upcoming movies — Martin Scorsese's "The Departed," due out Oct. 6, and Ed Zwick's "The Blood Diamond," following on Dec. 15 — DiCaprio at long last leaves the "coming of age" sphere and enters the world of real men, taking on roles that are emotionally complicated, roles that establish him as the once and future leading man.

"The Departed," which burrows into the Boston underworld, is vintage Scorsese, rife with grit and gore and more expletives than "Snakes on a Plane." As a cop who infiltrates a mob run by Jack Nicholson, DiCaprio stands fully baptized into the Scorsese canon, smashing gangsters in the head with beer mugs, holding fellow officers at gunpoint and going mano a mano with Nicholson in all his maniacal glory while trying to decipher the code of true loyalty.

For "The Blood Diamond," he spent six months in Africa, trading a Boston accent for Afrikaans to play a South African gun runner-mercenary who navigates war-torn Sierra Leone, vicious diamond cartels and moral vexations in the person of a comely journalist (Jennifer Connelly) to "help" a tribal fisherman (Djimon Hounsou) recover a diamond of unparalleled value.

COMING INTO HIS OWN

DiCaprio has long been considered one of the finest actors of his generation, but with these two films he seems ready to accept the Big Star mantle that "Titanic" tried to thrust on him almost 10 years ago.

"There is always a moment in an actor's life, in a man's life, when he begins to own his size," says Zwick. "When you begin taking responsibility for your opportunities, admitting the depth of your ambition, coming into a stage of mastery. And that is what is happening here."

It couldn't happen at a better time. With actors such as Mel Gibson and Tom Cruise seemingly falling off the power lists every other week, Hollywood has found itself wondering if the male superstar isn't going the way of its female counterpart — dwindling to extinction.

"There really aren't a lot of actors who can open a movie, are there?" says Graham King, who as a producer of "The Departed" and "The Blood Diamond" admits a fair amount of bias. "I mean, there's Brad, there's Johnny and there's Leo. People are going to be amazed," he adds, speaking of DiCaprio's performances.

Talking to the man himself, however, there is no indication of some supernova about to burst. DiCaprio, 31, is still gun-shy over the explosion of fame that followed "Titanic" and does little press. "I really feel the most important part of being an actor is to keep his personal life to himself," he says. "The less I know about an actor's daily activities, the less baggage I bring to his performance."

Although he does arrive for an interview and photo shoot at the Hotel Bel-Air with a stylist and Armani in tow, when he finally sits down to talk, he seems much more like the low-key local guy he professes to be than a star with $20-million-per status and a long-standing personal relationship with Scorsese.

"The Departed" is the third film the two have done together — after "Gangs of New York" and "The Aviator" — and the first contemporary story. Based on the highly regarded Hong Kong film "Infernal Affairs," William Monahan's script hit both their desks around the same time two years ago. "We both read it and said, 'We've got to do this film. Immediately,' " says DiCaprio. "Usually, you have to tinker with the story or the script — like 'The Aviator' took 10 years. But this was like, 'Let's do this, yes.' We got other people involved, and there it is."

Of course, those "other people" include Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, Vera Farmiga, Alec Baldwin and, last but certainly not least, Nicholson. "OK," DiCaprio admits with a laugh, "scheduling was a bit of an issue. And this is why I am not ready to be a director — this actor, that actor, the set, the lighting guy, the craft services. Trying to keep track of all that and keep the vision of the movie in your mind." He shakes his head. "Maybe someday. Not yet."

He had his hands full enough coping with the general anxiety that making a film generates and keeping up with Nicholson. "We all sort of rolled with it," he says. "With Nicholson you just have to play it the way he's playing it. More than any other acting experience I've had, Nicholson throws curveballs."

Not that he's complaining; the strain he and Damon felt walking into a scene with Nicholson helped them build their characters.

"His character is losing his mind, basically, seeing his power diminish, taking chances he normally wouldn't take," says DiCaprio of Nicholson's aging mob boss. "It helped us keep up the fear factor because Matt and I had to maintain that this is a very scary, dangerous man and you never know what you're going to get."

From Scorsese's perspective, DiCaprio more than held his own. "There is one scene he and Jack have where Leo has to prove he isn't a rat, only, of course, he is," the director says. "We shot it with double cameras, one on Leo, one on Jack and basically it is one long take. Watching the two of them together, playing off each other was one of the best things I have seen, ever."

A MATTER OF TRUST

Much has been made of Scorsese's attachment to DiCaprio, whom many critics see taking on the role Robert De Niro once had — a combination collaborator and male muse. DiCaprio will admit nothing of the kind, not even that he has become one of the director's go-to guys.

"I don't know that that's the case," he says. "There is a certain familiarity of working with people you've worked with before, and I trust Scorsese, which makes my job easier. Because I don't have to worry about everything all the time, I know that he is watching. One of the reasons I am such a Scorsese fan," he says, warming to what is clearly a favorite subject, "is that he has such respect for the people he puts up on-screen. He wants the characters to be as important as the construct of the film."

Scorsese, in turn, is just as complimentary. That people were surprised when he tapped an actor who seemed terminally youthful was something that never occurred to him.

"It's true that our relationship is different because there's a 30-year age difference," he says. "So our cultural references are different. Me, I don't even know what the modern world is anymore — they lock me on the set, then they take me to the editing room and lock me in there and sometimes I get to go to my house. But I always just looked at Leo as a terrific actor. I was not encumbered by anything else."

What may have begun as a teacher-student relationship evolved into something else. "I don't try to teach anything," says the director. "Leo is just incredibly receptive. I put something out there, and he takes it as far as he can go." As an example, he describes a scene in which DiCaprio's character must react to the violent death of another character. "It was a terrible day. We had weather problems, we had scheduling problems, and so the first take, the camera pans his face, OK, and then the second take, something clicks and what he found touched me. It was a very emotional moment. The second take. I'm ready to go four, six, eight takes, he gets it on the second take."

"Sometimes," Scorsese says, "you do pictures all these years, you get tired. You think, 'Why am I still doing this?' Then you get a moment like that."

For DiCaprio, who is in a very different career stage, moments like those are more promises than reaffirmation. He is seeing a wider range of roles than he did five years ago, he says, but asked if he is still having fun, he grimaces.

"Fun? No, that wouldn't be the word I'd use," he says. "There is a satisfaction when you see what you've done and it's good."

And if it's not?

"Well, what can I say? That is a bummer. Because while I don't want anyone to cry me a river or anything, making a movie is very hard work. But," he adds, "I'm not at a point in my life where fun is my priority.... My No. 1 priority is to do this thing that I've been wanting to do for as long as I can remember, to take advantage of the opportunities that I have right now."

In "The Blood Diamond," he found an intersection between passions — acting and activism. A longtime environmentalist, DiCaprio was drawn to the political backdrop of the story as much as he was to the character and the suspense. He was deeply affected by the months he spent in Mozambique and South Africa, where the exuberance of the human spirit provides a stark contrast with the coldness of the corporate soul. "Every problem in the world comes down to economics," he says. "In Africa you see what happens to a country when a corporation has an interest in a natural resource, like diamonds, how there has to be a social conscience at work as well."

While following the lines of a classic treasure adventure film, "The Blood Diamond" examines not only the impact of a bloody civil war but, more disturbingly, the use of child soldiers in such a war. Hounsou's character's son has been kidnapped by the Royal Air Force and forced to learn the bloody lessons of combat; his father's search for him gives the film a poignancy and a horror that puts it as much in the category of "Hotel Rwanda" as in "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre."

DiCaprio spent nearly a month in Africa just preparing for the role, learning the various dialects, the accents, how to handle the weapons. Then the shoot began and went on for five more months.

"It was difficult circumstances," says Zwick. "We were in challenging places — Mozambique is not Toronto. It isn't even Romania."

DiCaprio shrugs off the physical difficulty of the location work. "This is where being a movie star really does help," he says with a grin. "I mean, you've got your stylist with her Evian spritz and hand fan. You all get to go to the tent and have a nice lunch ..."

For him, the stress was what the stress always is — finding the character and taking it as far as it can go. "It's like all your senses are heightened and you're thinking about everything all the time: Is the accent right, is my body doing the right thing, am I saying the lines the way I want them to sound?"

He pauses and shrugs as if he thinks he has let himself get a bit carried away with the whole actor thing.

"See, again, that is why I can't imagine being a director. They have all that times 10. And it's true when you meet them in the real world, they are completely different than when they are on the set.

"But then," he adds, with a sidelong glance at the ground, "I guess, so am I."

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“Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” - Andy Warhol

Miami Herald critic Rene Rodriguez has seen Martin Scorsese's The Departed here in Toronto, and he's calling it "class-A pulp...grave, resonant, psychologically complex and acted to the skies.

And that's not all: "Anyone who's been waiting for Scorsese to return to form after the Oscar-baiting turgidness of The Aviator and Gangs of New York won't be disappointed," he's written. "This is Scorsese's best and most invigorating work since the underrated Casino, if not GoodFellas, as well as his most sheerly entertaining."

The expectations with Martin Scorsese continue to dip. I remember years ago when the hope was he that he would return to form with a Raging Bull - Taxi Driver style film. Now everyone understands he won't. Is the best they can hope for is a Goodfellas - Casino styling? Are those two films really different than Gangs of New York and The Aviator? I don't think so. The filmmaking is true to form in each film but the subject and storytelling is more fun in the former films.

I would say that his style gradually evolved from what you see in Taxi Driver to Good Fellas, in the sense he managed to blend his personal way of seeing things and puting them on camera with his many influences. And most of his films before Good Fellas were highly personal endeavours which were in part originated by his desire to make them, as opposed to Cape Fear or Age of Innocence, which are films that fell on his way, and in those he tries (succesfully for me) to apply his now secure style on different stories and genres.

I agree about Casino. I think of all his films, that's the one that better shows pretty much everything he's capable of doing on a movie in terms of techinique and handling of actors and performances. And is a territory in which he obviously feels more comfortable.

For better or worse, his style has now reach a halt, I mean that's his style and you can tell when you're watching a Scorsese movie, wether is Gangs or The Aviator or Kundun.

Expectations about his films are always exasperating for me. He can't be Scorsese in the 80's anymore, he can't be the guy from taxi driver. He's older now, he has a different life. He lives in movies now, more than before from what I can tell. His films have become more and more about being movies than about recreating some gritty documentary fell reality. He seems happy and content. He's not a tortured artist anymore, but his passion is just as strong. And he still is the best american director around, not to mention the most influential.

Critics and moviegoers alike are eager to see Martin Scorsese's "The Departed," a remake of the popular 2002 Hong Kong cops-and-gangsters drama "Infernal Affairs," written by Siu Fai Mak and Felix Chong. Transplanted to Boston, the coiled plot follows two young cops — one undercover with the mob (Leonardo DiCaprio), one working for the mob from inside the force (Matt Damon) — and their relationships with Costello, a Mafia-kingpin father figure played by Jack Nicholson.

The screenplay, by William Monahan ("Kingdom of Heaven"), is steeped in Boston's geography and history, its class grudges and casual racism. The dialogue churns with the authentic crudity of blue-collar cops and criminals beating their way to different types of justice, though some of the regional patois comes off a little insular to non-native ears ("southie," "staties," "three-decker"; Monahan even slips in a "numbas" just to make sure no one misses the Beantown dropped-"r" lilt).

The story has the kind of cold elegance, spasms of brutal violence and split loyalties that are so ripe for Scorsese's psychologically precise touch. But the script I have is only the backbone of the story, because the director apparently encouraged and used a significant amount of improv during filming.

This openness led to a scenario that has become infamous since last summer, when it was filmed. Nicholson brought some verisimilitude to a sex scene that he tweaked himself the day before shooting in which Costello cavorts with two prostitutes and finds a very original sexual use for cocaine. The studio has recently tested the film both with and without the scene. Amazingly, this integral plot development has remained in Scorsese's cut despite the fact that scores rise when audiences see the film without the sex-toy shenanigans. Even more amazingly, the studio thus far is leaving the final decision up to the director (which must be giving Alan Horn, who tries to purge smoking from Warner Bros. movies, the night shivers). However it plays out, this is what DVD audio commentaries were made for.

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“Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” - Andy Warhol

I love it when people start talking about expectations dipping and a lack of return to form. Especially after his last two films were up for Best Picture. I really don't understand how some of you come to your conclusions.

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It's like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black.